About

Welcome to the Jejune Institute, a mind-bending San Francisco
phenomenon where 10,000 people became "inducted" without ever quite
realizing what they'd signed up for. Was it a cult? Was it an
elaborate game? Told from the participants’ perspectives, the film
looks over the precipice at an emergent new art form where real
world and fictional narratives collide, creating unforeseen and
often unsettling consequences. Fusing elements of counter-culture,
new religious movements and street art, THE INSTITUTE invites
viewers down the rabbit hole into a secret underground world teeming
just beneath the surface of everyday life.

Contact

Reviews

Tantalizing semi-doc is not for the literal-minded.

The Hollywood Reporter | by John DeFore

Half put-on and half document of a fantastically elaborate,
gamelike art project, Spencer McCall's The Institute takes
viewers on a journey that was shared (to greater and lesser
extents) by thousands of San Francisco and Oakland residents
from 2008 to 2011. Intentionally hard to decipher, the film will
frustrate viewers who insist on knowing which interviewees are
recounting real experiences and which are perpetuating fictions
hatched by the game's creator, Jeff Hull. But mystery is part of
the appeal, and the film's special-engagement rollout, currently
expanding beyond California, seems likely to carry it to its
most receptive, multiplex-averse audiences. Read
more

A divisive, shadowy conversation-starter of a movie that’s as
much fun to talk and think about as it is to watch.

The Dissolve | by Nathan Rabin

The Institute generates a lot of suspense and intrigue by
remaining so willfully, purposefully obtuse that it’s difficult
to tell where the game ends and reality begins, or whether the
distinction between the two is relevant to the game’s engineers
or the filmmakers chronicling it. That can be frustrating, but
it’s also exhilarating, depending on viewers’ tolerance for
being strung along and manipulated. Read
more

Down the Rabbit Hole with Spencer McCall's The Institute.

The Huffington Post | by E. Nina Rothe

It is not often that a film leaves me baffled. Alright, at the
risk of sounding a bit full of myself, I think I've actually
understood all the films I've ever watched, in one way or
another.
Until The Institute.Read
more

It is playful, but profound. It is fact, and it is fiction.
It is unbelievable, but it is thought-provoking.

The Times-Picayune | By Mike Scott, NOLA.com

Director Spencer McCall's film -- one of the growing number of
documentaries occupying that "elsewhere" space separating fact
and fiction (think "Exit Through the Gift Shop" and "Catfish")
-- is a brilliantly constructed film, given that those seeming
paradoxes perfectly apply to the subject matter McCall so
effectively explores. Read
more

Spencer McCall’s bewildering The Institute: Life is elsewhere

The Portland Phoenix | By Nicholas Schroeder,
portland.thephoenix.com

Ostensibly, the first feature film by Spencer McCall seeks to
provide a portrait of a San Francisco organization called the
Jejune Institute, whose mission hovers somewhere between the
poles of self-help, performance art, disinformation, and an
alternate-reality game. But if this is a portrait, we're not in
art class anymore. Over a series of interviews with organizers
and "inductees" spliced with raw-seeming candid footage of
Jejune activities in full swing, we join together the bare bones
of a most mysterious organizational body. Read
more

WiFilmFest 2013 Preview: The Institute

Dane101 | by Sean Weitner, dane101.com

Remember on LOST whenever they would find a new Dharma film and
thread it into the projector? For some, they were the show’s low
point, when a perfectly pleasant soap put on airs. For the rest,
they were the high point, weird windows into their not-quite-non
sequitur fake history. Read
more

Indie Pick of the Week: The Institute (Review)

Something Obvious | somethingobvious.net

Over this past weekend we attended the Atlanta Film Festival.
One of the films we saw was a documentary titled “The
Institute”. The documentary was filmed by Spencer McCall and
tells the story of an alternate reality game revolved around the
Jejune Institute in San Francisco. Strange flyers that promoted
the institutes scientific breakthroughs were hung throughout San
Francisco and invited anyone who was interested to visit the
institute’s local headquarters. These inquiring minds were led
to a room where they watched a strange introductory video
featuring Jejune founder Octavio Coleman, Esq. Were these people
being inducted into a cult? At first it seemed as if this was
the case, but as we would soon find out it was not.Read
more

San Francisco's Baffling Jejune Institute Gets A Documentary

The Awl | By Rick Paulas, theawl.com

The toughest part of writing about San Francisco's Jejune
Institute "thing" was trying to describe it, something I
attempted to do for this site twice. In a first piece about the
citywide game, which was put on by a group called Nonchalance, I
went with "[p]art public-art installation, part scavenger hunt,
part multimedia experiment, part narrative story." For the
follow-up, I added "underground alternate reality game" to the
mix. Both summaries missed the mark, partly because of my own
inadequacies as a writer, but also a symptom of the project's
sprawling originality—it wasn't like anything else out there,
and that was part of what made it so fantastic. Thankfully,
Spencer McCall went ahead and made The Institute, a 90-minute
documentary about the project that neatly encapsulates what made
this whole whatever-it-was so wonderful. Read
more

Inventive, Complex World of ‘The Institute’

HollywoodChicago.com | By BrianTT, hollywoodchicago.com

“To those dark horses with the spirit to look up and see, a
recondite family awaits.” While the Sundance Film Festival goes
on all through Park City, a select group of truly independent
films is unspooling up on Main Street under the banner of
Slamdance. One of the more interesting Slamdance selections this
year was the great “The Institute,” a quasi-documentary about an
“Alternate Reality Game” that took place in San Francisco from
2008 to 2011. Read
more

Slamdance Film Review: The Institute

Slug Magazine | BY John Ford, slugmag.com

Following the storyline of a massive reality game created by
Jeff Hull, The Institute searches for the boundary that
separates what is real and what is fiction. The game is played
throughout the streets of San Francisco—both above and
below—described as an "urban playground movement" and as the
"ultimate reality game" that wonderfully combines street art and
performance theater. As more "inductees" get involved in the
search for "Elsewhere," which is more a way of being than a
physical place, the game begins to spiral out of the hands of
"The Creator," and it becomes clear that this is not a game to
some. But the reason for the game's existence might be more
intriguing—and more mysterious—than the game itself. Using a
combination of interviews and film footage from the creators of
the game and from participants, McCall puts together a well-spun
story that takes viewers all the way down the rabbit hole. Read
more

Slamdance 2013: The Institute

KUER | By Doug Fabrizio, radiowest.kuer.org

A missing girl, a cult-like organization and its guru, a
well-meaning public agency no one has ever heard of, and the
actual brick-and-mortar cities of the San Francisco Bay Area.
These are the ingredients in a reality-bending game profiled in
Spencer McCall’s documentary film The Institute, which showed at
this year's Slamdance Film Festival. More than 10,000 people
played the Games of Nonchalance, but who was behind them and
what was the point? Thursday, we’ll journey through the looking
glass with McCall to explore a world teeming just beneath the
surface of everyday life. Read
more

The Institute

Film Threat | By Mark Bell, filmthreat.com

Spencer McCall’s documentary The Institute takes a look at a
fantastical alternate reality game that played out around San
Francisco from 2008 to 2011. Created by Jeff Hull, the ARG
revolved around the Jejune Institute and its fictional chairman,
Octavio Coleman, Esq, as it led those who followed the
instructions hidden around the city on a journey that
recontextualized day-to-day reality into something far more
interesting. Read
more

The Movies to Know From Sundance — and the Year Ahead

The Village Voice | By Scott Foundas, villagevoice.com

Never to be counted out, the concurrent Slamdance festival—once
a nose-thumbing start-up—is now, after 18 years, practically an
éminence grise itself, and always good for one or two finds of
its own. This year, one of those is Spencer McCall's The
Institute, a documentary portrait of the Jejune Institute, an
elaborate "alternate reality game" that unfolded on the streets
of San Francisco from 2008 to 2011. Read
more